Alright, I have been binge watching the show now that it's over. I has opinions now:
I don't think they realized they were throwing away the Dothraki against the army of the dead. If anything I think it's silly and unrealistic that they did so poorly. It may even have been more like "oops no more budget let's get rid of the horsemen from a distance with some lights". What I would have really expected from a bunch of 2000 pound horses slamming into a bunch of brittle zombies with no formation on an open field with no pikes is more like Theodan's charge against the orcs: just flat out smashes quite a lot of them.
I think a better presentation would have been something like that, with the difference that there just ends up being too many undead. The cavalry charges in, mows down a bunch, comes back, goes back in, mows down a bunch and right about round 3 they're just too exhausted to do it again and the undead are still coming. Like "well that worked great and was a fine idea but they aren't staying dead from horse ramming and there's just too many of em."
It also shows that staying behind the defenses was apparently pointless. They weren't winning that fight no-way-no-how.
So I think the presentation was flawed but the strategy itself seemed reasonable at the time. They just underestimated what they were up against. Nothing we'd seen up to this point showed how dangerous masses of undead really could be.
Granted, stashing people in the crypt for safety against a guy whose main ability is to raise the dead strikes me as a dumber idea. Someone probably should have thought of that.
The Arya kill I thought was reasonable. We're really not given a great overview of the Godswood other than there's a lot of trees in there. Given her moves in the fights up to that point, my bet would be she was in the trees and quite possibly came at the Night King from a combination of using the trees and then leaping off the heads of the massed undead standing around behind him. I don't think she was being sneaky so much as fast and acrobatic. I do wonder if she was being given an assist of some sort by Bran, though. He was clearly doing something but he didn't say and nothing in the show made it obvious what he was doing. Given what he could do with Hodor, it made me wonder if he was helping her sneak around more effectively, if not by impacting her then by impacting any undead that should have seen her. But that's pure conjecture since she just shows up with no explanation other than we know she's got moves.
I don't think they realized they were throwing away the Dothraki against the army of the dead. If anything I think it's silly and unrealistic that they did so poorly. It may even have been more like "oops no more budget let's get rid of the horsemen from a distance with some lights". What I would have really expected from a bunch of 2000 pound horses slamming into a bunch of brittle zombies with no formation on an open field with no pikes is more like Theodan's charge against the orcs: just flat out smashes quite a lot of them.
I think a better presentation would have been something like that, with the difference that there just ends up being too many undead. The cavalry charges in, mows down a bunch, comes back, goes back in, mows down a bunch and right about round 3 they're just too exhausted to do it again and the undead are still coming. Like "well that worked great and was a fine idea but they aren't staying dead from horse ramming and there's just too many of em."
It also shows that staying behind the defenses was apparently pointless. They weren't winning that fight no-way-no-how.
So I think the presentation was flawed but the strategy itself seemed reasonable at the time. They just underestimated what they were up against. Nothing we'd seen up to this point showed how dangerous masses of undead really could be.
Granted, stashing people in the crypt for safety against a guy whose main ability is to raise the dead strikes me as a dumber idea. Someone probably should have thought of that.
The Arya kill I thought was reasonable. We're really not given a great overview of the Godswood other than there's a lot of trees in there. Given her moves in the fights up to that point, my bet would be she was in the trees and quite possibly came at the Night King from a combination of using the trees and then leaping off the heads of the massed undead standing around behind him. I don't think she was being sneaky so much as fast and acrobatic. I do wonder if she was being given an assist of some sort by Bran, though. He was clearly doing something but he didn't say and nothing in the show made it obvious what he was doing. Given what he could do with Hodor, it made me wonder if he was helping her sneak around more effectively, if not by impacting her then by impacting any undead that should have seen her. But that's pure conjecture since she just shows up with no explanation other than we know she's got moves.